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For long time I've used a handful of different views in Outlook with different filters and formatting. I use different filters to help me focus on specific things (e.g. I have a view for my current project that only shows messages from the project team). This has worked fairly well for the most part.

When my organization upgraded to Office 365 earlier this year, I wanted to start taking advantage of the focused inbox. However, if I'm using a view filter it doesn't work since the focused inbox is essentially just a view filter and my view filter is overriding it. This isn't a big deal when my view filter is based on sender but some of my other (more complex) view filters end up showing things from the "other" inbox in the "focused" inbox because my view filter isn't actually filtering them out.

I cannot figure out what advanced filter option I need to use to have my view filter exclude "other" inbox items. What do I need to add to my advance filter on my view to filter out "other" inbox items?

cjc
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  • I can't find a property/field on emails that include if it's in Focused or Other. I already have Search Folders as @aidan suggests, like the Unread mail one; I'd like to configure it such as "All unread (which can be in different folders) excluding only those marked Other". Or a way to have "Focused" and "Other" tabs on Search Folder view, or similar. Or using a rule to deal with "Other" mails (i.e. mark them as read) would work too. But "Focused/Other" doesn't seem available to inspection anywhere? – lessthanideal May 22 '20 at 12:16

2 Answers2

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This should be by design. In this situation, it is suggested to use Search Folder to manage your emails.

Use Search Folders to find messages or other Outlook items

Aidan
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  • Is there a way to save a search to quickly pull it up again with the exact same settings? The advantage to the view filter is that I can quickly switch the view to see only the subset of messages I want without having to rebuild it every time (I almost always am using a view with some sort of filter). – cjc May 06 '20 at 22:26
  • @cjc that's what Search Folders do, save the search settings. Did it work for you as a solution? Per my comment up on the question, I can't find a way to make search folders exclude "Other" emails. – lessthanideal May 22 '20 at 12:21
  • @lessthanideal, not really. As you said, it has the same problem as using view filters – cjc May 31 '20 at 02:43
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Unfortunately, I don't have the real answer as Microsoft has apparently not yet included a field or keyword to identify Focused vs Other. My interim workaround is this:

I chose a Category that's not in use and named it "Other email to ignore". Periodically I go into the Other tab and select all the email (or all the recent un-categorized email) and mark it to that category. It's pretty quick.

Then in my Search folder I specify a criterion like this: Search Folder criteria

Then when I select that Search Folder, I don't see all the Other email.

The other part of my solution is that I periodically remove those Other emails by either deleting them or moving them to a different folder. That requires a more careful look, of course, than simply Categorizing them for exclusion from my Search Folder.

The main disadvantage is that periodically I have to manually go into the Other tab to delete, move, or mark the emails with that Category.

I am looking forward to the day when Outlook will be upgraded to allow a more straightforward, automatic and elegant solution.

HTH.

yosh m
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